I am a strong supporter of personal privacy.

I hate that we are steadily losing not just our privacy but that children are now being raised to believe that surveillance is perfectly normal.

So, I often read articles on the subject. I happened across this today and wondered what posters here might think.

Face-blurring technology raises privacy questions

SHOULD we modify our conception of privacy thanks to the seemingly unstoppable spread of CCTV surveillance networks? Jack Brassil thinks so. He's a computer scientist at Hewlett-Packard's laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, who is testing a technology called Cloak that aims to limit the extent of privacy invasions. "Rather than prohibit surveillance, our system seeks to discourage surveillers distributing video without the authorisation of the surveilled," he says.

Cloak has two key requirements. First, CCTV users, such as municipal councils and businesses, would have to sign up to a system that electronically obscures the faces of people who do not want their pictures to be published in video footage that is passed to others. The list of such people would be akin to the national "do-not-dial" lists designed to prevent cold-calling, Brassil says.

Second, the person opting in to Cloak needs to carry a "privacy enabling device" - most conveniently a phone with GPS capability. This wirelessly beams the user's position and velocity to a central server which forwards the data to the CCTV's control centre. Image processing software then uses the subject's trajectory to identify and obscure their face in the CCTV footage if it is to be distributed. In Hewlett-Packard's simulations, the technology is workable, even in dense crowds.

The idea raises broad societal and legal questions, however. "I don't think its objectives are right at all," says privacy analyst Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute in the UK. "People shouldn't have to opt in to get privacy protection. And this system actively invades your privacy because it tells the service where you are at all times."

Brassil concedes that his proposed solution may not suit everyone, but says the important point is the discussion of privacy. Brown also notes that there are transatlantic legal differences to contend with. In Europe, data protection laws prevent surveillance videos being passed on while only a few states in the US have such legislation. He says another way forward is to encourage engineers to design privacy into technologies from the start.

Brown will have his work cut out, says Brassil, who is to publish his work as part of a book on video surveillance later this year. "Technology is advancing far faster than our ability to understand its privacy implications," he says.

What, no implant GPS tracking for us yet?????

Still, Big Brother is watching whether anyone believes it or not.

I think we should all wear masks all the time, and purposely go to the doctor and install perhaps several small devices that throw our GPS location somewhere else in case they've already secretly implanted us with such trackers. This would really screw them up!

Whenever meeting up with someone, we'd just momentarily take off our mask to confirm. To call from a distance to someone we'd think is our friend, though, we'd have to develop special bird calls...

It'd be fun and exciting, not to mention confusing as hell for the govt.

Seriously, though...most of us have lives too boring for the government to care about all the time. Unless things got really totalitarian, I'm sure people wouldn't know the difference even if the government secretly increased surveillance 100-fold.

anyone read 1984???

this and the RFID chip business is enough to make just about anyone go back and re-read the book of Revelations..

What's in the Book of Revelations that talks about this sort of things? I don't have a Bible with me and I don't know it well enough... ^_^

well, the comment was slightly tongue in cheeck but there are several references in Revelations to the "end times" or the 'end of days' where those that are left after all the 'believers' are ascended to heaven will be forced to take the mark of the beast and be assigned a number. People who don't take the mark and their number won't be able to buy or sell goods..

many people see similarities between those passages and things like RFID's and national Identity cards, social security numbers..

and so on..

That's pretty cool. At least I haven't made the sign of the beast yet...